ORA Interactive Bolsters Strategic Leadership Team with Key Executive appointments

ORA Interactive, an award-winning user experience and digital product studio headquartered in Chicago, has named Andrew Nieman Chief Strategy Officer and Michael Wesolowski Director of Experience Design. The appointments follow a period of significant growth and reflect the studio’s commitment to maintaining a range of world-class capabilities.

“With a tidal wave of emerging technology on the rise, such as AR/VR, connected devices and conversational experiences to name a few, our clients’ reliance on us for strategic guidance has never been so great,” said Mike Kelly, Founder and CEO, ORA. “In addition to further strengthening our core mobile offering, these appointments reflect a commitment to helping our clients identify new strategic opportunities and imagine the next generation of their cross-channel experiences.”

Andrew Nieman has been named Chief Strategy Officer charged with continuing to strengthen the studio’s core mobile and web app development offerings along with further enhancing the organisation's ability to provide strategic business consulting. Over the past three years Nieman has led client acquisition and success, helping scale the studio’s headcount by 80% year-over-year. During that period, Nieman secured partnerships with the likes of Chervon, InterPark and Southeastern Grocers, as well as some of Chicago's most high profile startups. He also spearheaded ORA's inclusion as an emerging tech sector ambassador during Illinois' annual showcase at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Going forward, Nieman will continue to help grow ORA’s national footprint supporting both ORA’s new Denver studio and its third location to be announced in early 2018.

“It is common for prospective clients to come to us with no concrete idea of what they actually want. They simply explain a problem or pain point, and we walk them through a variety of emerging technology solutions we can build to solve the issue,” said Nieman, Chief Strategy Officer, ORA. “In that sense, we have never had a traditional new business team—rather business strategists who act to best pair our clients’ needs with the right solution.”

To lead ORA’s user experience practice, Michael Wesolowski has been appointed Director of Experience Design. In this role, he will deepen the studio’s user experience and design expertise including further enhancing customer research, service design and information architecture in-house capabilities. Prior to joining ORA, Wesolowski was an accomplished experience architect at Salesforce Experience Design, creating intuitive and elegant user-centred design solutions for clients like BMW, Lexus, Toyota, American Red Cross, ComEd, Bank of America and The Home Depot. Holding a Master of Science in Human-Computer Interaction and a Master of Arts in Sociology, he is a published UX thought leader, designer, mentor, public speaker and instructor at the design boot camp DESIGNATION in Chicago’s 1871 tech hub.